The Hunt For Red October (film) - Production

Production

Producer Mace Neufeld optioned Tom Clancy's novel after reading galley proofs in February 1985. Despite the book becoming a best seller, no Hollywood studio was interested because of its content. Neufeld said, "I read some of the reports from the other studios, and the story was too complicated to understand." After one and half years, he finally got a high-level executive at Paramount Pictures to read Clancy's novel and agree to develop it into a film.

Screenwriters Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart worked on the screenplay while Neufeld approached the U.S. Navy for approval. They feared top secret information or technology might be revealed. However, several admirals liked Clancy's book and reasoned that the film could do for submariners what Top Gun did for the Navy's jet fighter pilots. Captain Michael Sherman, director of the Navy's western regional information office in Los Angeles, suggested changes to the script that would present the Navy in a positive light.

The Navy gave the filmmakers access to submarines, allowing them to photograph unclassified sections of Chicago and Portsmouth to use in set and prop design. Key cast and crew members rode in subs, including Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn doing an overnight trip in USS Salt Lake City. Glenn, who played the commander of Dallas, trained by assuming the identity of a submarine captain on board the Houston (which portrayed Dallas in most scenes). The sub's crew all took "orders" from Glenn, who was being prompted by the actual commanding officer.

Glenn had been a U.S. Marine. Baldwin also learned to steer a Los Angeles-class submarine. Some extras portraying the Dallas crew were submariners, including the pilot of the DSRV, Lt Cmdr George Billy, commander of the DSRV. Submariners from San Diego were cast as extras because it was easier to hire them than training actors. Crew from USS La Jolla, including Lt Mark Draxton, took leave to participate in filming. According to an article in Sea Classics, at least two sailors from the Atlantic Fleet-based Dallas took leave and participated in the Pacific Fleet-supported filming. The crew of Houston called their month-long filming schedule the "Hunt for Red Ops." Houston made over 40 emergency surfacing "blows" for rehearsal and for the cameras.

Baldwin was approached in December 1988 but he was not told for what role. Klaus Maria Brandauer was cast as Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius but two weeks into filming he quit due to a prior commitment. The producers faxed the script to Sean Connery who, at first, declined because it didn't make sense. He was indeed missing the first page. He arrived in L.A. on a Friday and was supposed to start filming on Monday but he requested a day to rehearse. Principal photography began on April 3, 1989 with a $30 million budget. The Navy lent the film crew the Houston, the Enterprise, two frigates (USS Wadsworth (FFG-9) and USS Reuben James (FFG-57)), helicopters, and a dry-dock crew.

Filmmaker John Milius revised some of the film's script, writing a few speeches for Sean Connery and all of his Russian dialogue. (He asked to rewrite the whole film but was only required to do the Russian sequences.) Rather than choosing between the realism of Russian dialog (with subtitles), or the audience-friendly use of English (with or without Russian accents), the filmmakers compromised with a deliberate conceit. The film begins with the actors speaking Russian (with English subtitles), but in an early scene, the camera zooms in on actor Peter Firth's mouth as he casually switches in mid-sentence to speaking in English (on the word "Armageddon", which is the same in both languages), after which the Soviets' dialogue is in English. Only towards the end of the film, once the Russian and American submariners are interacting together, do some of the actors speak in Russian again.

Filming in submarines was impractical and five soundstages on the Paramount backlot were used. Two 50-foot square platforms housing mock-ups of Red October and Dallas were built, standing on hydraulic gimbals that simulated the sub's movements. Connery recalled, "It was very claustrophobic. There were 62 people in a very confined space, 45 feet above the stage floor. It got very hot on the sets, and I'm also prone to sea sickness. The set would tilt to 45 degrees. Very disturbing." The veteran actor shot for four weeks and the rest of the production shot for additional months on location in Port Angeles, Washington and the waters off Los Angeles.

Being made before sophisticated CGI in order to achieve the film's opening, impressive, long pull-out reveal and show the immense (and accurate) size of a real-life Soviet Typhoon-class sub (the type that Red October was meant to be) a nearly full scale above-the-water-line mockup was constructed, consisting of two floating barges welded together.

Each country's submarine had its own background color: Soviet submarines, such as Red October and Konovalov, had interiors in black with silver trim. American ships, such as Dallas and Enterprise, had grey interiors. However, during one scene when Dallas goes to a higher alert status it was flooded with red light.

Early filming was aboard USS Reuben James in the area of the Juan de Fuca Strait and Puget Sound in March 1989. The ship operated out of U.S. Coast Guard Station Port Angeles. The H-3 detachment from the Battlecats of HSL-43 operated out of NAS Whidbey Island, after being displaced by the filmcrew. Most underwater scenes were filmed using smoke with a model sub connected to 12 cables, giving precise, smooth control for turns. Computer effects, in their infancy, created bubbles and other effects such as particulates in the water.

By February 1990, just before the film's theatrical release, the Soviet government announced that the Communist Party was no longer completely in charge, effectively ending the Cold War. Set during this period, there were concerns that with its end, the film would be irrelevant but Neufeld felt that it "never really represented a major problem". To compensate for the change in Russia's political climate, an on-screen crawl appears at the beginning of the film stating that it takes place in 1984 during the Cold War.

Tony Seiniger designed the film's poster and drew inspiration from Soviet poster art, utilizing bold red, white and black graphics. According to him, the whole ad campaign was designed to have a "techno-suspense quality to it". The idea was to play up the thriller aspects and downplay the political elements.